I had a lot of problems figuring out how to get the remote to work that came bundled with Creatives SB Live! 24-bit External USB.

Here is what I did.

Lirc uses alsa_usb to handle this remote. So you have to have ALSA installed.
Support for this soundcard got added to alsa 1.0.12.
You have to use alsa-driver until alsa 1.0.12 is in the kernel. Read the Gentoo Linux ALSA guide how to do this.
It is not marked stable yet, so you probably have to unmask it.

When you have alsa-driver working, you can do this:

Code:

$ cat /proc/asound/hwdep

You should see a line like this:

Quote:

03-00: SB Live! 24-bit External remote control

It means that you have support for the remote in ALSA. The numbers (03-00 in the example) might be different on your system.

To handle the remote you need Lirc.

Add this line to your /etc/make.conf to get support for alsa_usb in Lirc:

Code:

LIRC_DEVICES="alsa_usb"

Also, make sure that you have the enabled the lirc USE flag in /etc/make.conf

Then emerge Lirc:

Code:

# emerge -av lirc

The remote is not recognized by Lirc. So you have to define your own /etc/lircd.conf.
You can use a tool called irrecord to do this, or just copy the example below.

The only thing you need now is to make the applications understand your remote.
You need to create a file named .lircrc in your home directory. This file configures which button does what in which application.
Read more about the configuration and Lirc in general in the HOWTO LIRC